Somebody asked me whether I’d be chronicling my experiences heading to the Superbowl, and the answer is: poorly. I haven’t been keeping up with my FilmTraveler blog because I have a backlog of entries about Charles Darwin that I felt honor-bound to post before switching to anything frivolous. It’s no wonder honor is so rare; it’s bloody inconvenient.

So I’ll be resurrecting it a teeny bit in order to post some updates whenever Facebook status updates prove too restrictive. The trouble with Facebook is that it’s given a lot of talented people the illusion that by posting an occasional thought they’re fulfilling their gifts as writers. Can you imagine if Christopher Nolan had written a status update instead of Inception?

Why I’m Going to the Superbowl

I’m going to assume anyone reading this already knows my brother and I made a Doritos Crash the Superbowl commercial and it got picked as a finalist. So I’ll skip to the details. I’m on my way to Indianapolis in three hours to jump on the Superbowl hype-train, and we’ll be spending the game in the Frito-Lay skybox with the other finalists, corporate and creative bigwigs, and best of all, Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island (the creators of the famous Saturday Night Live digital shorts). There are several official events and social events planned, and other than an itinerary I don’t know what’s going to happen or how.

So, now…

As for the commercial: Jonathan did most of the work. I came up with a bunch of ideas for other commercials, none of which we had time to shoot, and I also suggested lots of ideas for the winning commercial, most of which he wisely ignored. So I mostly just helped execute his idea, managed the dog Huff, helped steer things a bit, did some cleanup work on the video in AfterEffects, gave him some options for alternate props and voiceovers—but more than anything else, I helped promote the living shit out of the commercial once it got picked. I slapped together the website in 24 hours, got a big bump from Reddit by starting an AMA (Ask Me Anything), helped finagle and contribute to some press stories, did a lot of Facebook integration to encourage voting and interaction, started a Daily Reminder email and various Huff features, and created a Digital Short. I planned to use the short as a companion viral video but Frito-Lay nixed it and so now I’m just going to have to hand it to Andy and Akiva and Jorma of The Lonely Island as a homage, and post it after the game for laughs.

With any luck, I’ll have a couple of neat stories to tell, and if I have time (don’t count on it) I’ll try to post some of ’em here. The trouble is, I no longer think I’m interesting or that I have anything to say on a blog worth reading, which is why I don’t write much publicly anymore. (I think instead of bar mitzvahs and anniversary parties, people should get parties thrown for when they finally realize they’re full of shit. Maybe it would have happened to me sooner.) So it’s hard summoning the energy to chatter away on a blog. The interesting people are out there building superconductors and doing cancer research. I just write and direct stuff.